A month of eating dangerously

Last Sunday was the eighth anniversary of our moving to Singapore.  We celebrated this auspicious occasion with a traditional Singapore dinner of  sausage and potato pie, washed down with a nice bottle of Valpolicella.  This was indubitably tasty, and had the benefit of being inhaled unquestioningly by the kids, but it just confirmed for me a feeling that has been growing for a while, that although we have lived in Asia a long time, we are still only really dipping our toes in the exotic waters of our adopted homeland.  And that it is time that changed.

I discussed this with Mr Hooker over another very Asian dinner of steak frites a few days later.  "I'm thinking", I said, "of experimenting on myself.  Gastronomically I mean.  I think it would be really interesting to eat in a hawker centre every day for a month.  A different food every day.  And, you know, push the boat out - try the weird stuff."  Mr H, fork suspended mid-air and wearing an expression that fell somewhere between concern and horror, diligently reminded me that (a) I am a huge control freak, particularly where culinary matters are concerned; (b) being truly omnivorous in Asia is not for the faint-hearted; and (c) when unfed, I am unsafe to approach without protective gear.  I told him that I had taken those matters into consideration (I had not), that I thought it would be funny (it may be, but probably not for me), and that in any event item (c) was other people's problem, not mine.  "Well", he said.  "You seem to have made your mind up.  But if you're going to do this, you really should do it properly.  No chickening out of the really gruesome stuff."

Well, that sure got me thinking: what are the local delights that I am most terrified of eating?  After much reflection, and in no particular order (other than noting that chicken feet cannot come anywhere other than first, and by some quite significant margin), I have honed a top ten hit parade of scariness, and I solemnly swear to do all I can to sample every one of the below over the course of the next four weeks:

Food?  Not food?

(1) Chicken feet.  I'm not sure that I need to elaborate on this.  Honestly what I'm struggling with most is the conceptual problem of how to ingest something that my brain (surely correctly) files firmly in the category of "not food".  That said, Monseiur Mangetout once ate an entire aeroplane and used to snack on lightbulbs, so I am sure I will muddle through.


(2) Frog porridge.  I've never eaten frog, and I don't like porridge.  Porridge in this context is not even the oatmeal version, but congee (rice boiled in water until it disintegrates), which would, in the absence of frogs, have its own place on this list - I have a peculiar horror of food that has no texture, and to me, anything capable of being described as "gruel" just conjures up images of Dickensian workhouses.  Apparently there are restaurants in Singapore that keep live frogs so you can pick your dinner before it goes to frog slaughter and ends up on your plate, which just goes to show that even if you think something can't get any worse, there's a good chance you are wrong.  I am willing to test my boundaries to meet this challenge but even I draw the line at having to catch my own lunch.

(3) Fish ball soup.  I know this doesn't sound that bad, but you should smell the stuff.  Seriously, it's like Oscar the Grouch's trash can filled with mackerel and left in the sun for a week.  And I have a lingering fear that the balls may be eyeballs.... or other balls.   *Shudders*.

Public bathroom floor optional

(4) Durian.  Ah, the King of Fruits, the partaking of which has been described as "like eating strawberry ice cream off the floor of a public toilet".  I ate a durian mooncake once (it was a work dinner, I didn't have a choice), and it was all I could taste for three days afterwards.  Come to think of it though, bearing in mind some of the other things I'm going to have to eat over the next four weeks, that may actually not be a bad thing.

(5) Fried carrot cake.  Don't let the name fool you.  Chai tow kway is not the carrot cake you are familiar with.  In fact, it has no carrot in it at all.  It is radish cake (I can't imagine what even that actually is, radish not jumping to mind as an optimal cake ingredient), fried with pickled radishes and turnips, eggs, and fish sauce.  Sometimes when I eat a really good piece of bread, I marvel at the fact that anyone ever had the idea to grind wheat, add yeast, and bake the result.  I have the same level of astonishment about the existence of chai tow kway, but for very different reasons.

A geoduck clam.  Scary, Mary.

(6) Geoduck clams.  This one deserves a picture.  These things are grotesque.  I could draw some comparisons but this is a family blog (kind of).  I don't think I need to go into details of why I have hitherto shrunk from eating this monstrosity.

(7) Pig organ soup.  I don't know what the organs are.  I don't want to know.  I am hoping beyond hope that they will be visually unidentifiable and I can just hold my nose, chew, swallow, and chalk this one up to experience.


(8) Century eggs.  I'm not a big fan of regular eggs, to be honest, so why anyone would bury one for several months before eating it is beyond me. Wikipedia's comment that "the yolk is a dark green to grey colour, with... an odour of sulphur and ammonia, while the white becomes a dark brown, translucent jelly with salty or little flavour" does not in any way dispel my lack of understanding, or mitigate my absolute lack of enthusiasm at the prospect of eating this.  Having looked again at the pictures, I think this one may take the silver medal for gruesomeness, behind the chicken feet.

(9) Fish head curry.  This is a big Singapore speciality which I've actually eaten before, but the difference this time round is that Mr Hooker's exhortation not to be a pussy about this exercise means that I am going to have to man up and eat the eyeballs.  Or one of them, at least.  Ick!

(10) Black chicken.  I'm sure (at least I hope) that it tastes like regular chicken, but those skinny little goosebumpy blue bodies in the chiller at the supermarket have always totally freaked me out - they look like they belong in a sci-fi movie.  Just ugh, frankly.

So, those are the stars of the show, but I'm sure there are other equivalently titillating delights to be discovered.  The venue I have chosen for this challenge, the Chinatown Complex hawker centre, is a truly terrifying place, heaving with people, cacophonous with the noise of delivering and chopping and cooking and serving and eating and living.  To the untrained eye it also looks absolutely filthy but this is Singapore, The Cleanest Place in the World (TM), so I know, by act of faith, that it cannot be.  It had better not be, or this will be a very short-lived experience.  Though on second thoughts, maybe that would not be such a bad thing.

So, it's going to be a big dinner for me tonight.  And a big breakfast tomorrow, come to that.  I will post my adventures on here on a weekly basis, and hopefully by the end of September I will have opened my eyes, tested my tastebuds (and gag reflex), and maybe even established some new local favourites. And if all else fails, bearing in mind the list above, it does at least seem possible that I will have lost a bit of weight!  Silver linings...